Going to LA!!

So its official I have been accepted onto the Gnomon 3 year Entertainment Design program :D

Its been a really long few months working on my portfolio. I haven't blogged much mostly due to the hours I was sinking into refining my old work, working on new projects and brushing up on my basic sketching.

But it all feels worth it now that I have made it into this amazing school! I have never improved as much as I did when I was taking the Gnomon online courses which feels like a very long time ago now. So needless to say I am really excited to get started in January! First though I have to work out a whole lot of logistical fluff, selling things here, getting together some funds, immigration stuff etc. its going to be a pretty busy few weeks ahead.

I know I haven't been posting much on this blog and as I said before the high work load was a big factor but it was also a little difficult being on my own and not having a lot of direction. I tried to land a few jobs and take on some freelance but most of it didn't pay off. The hard times did make me reflect on where I was and where I wanted to be with regards to my digital work and that was the main impetus spurring me on to go back to school. I believe I have the drive and passion to be up there and it took a lot of time to accept that actually getting there was going to take even longer than I had thought 3 years ago when I decided to move off my original plan to become an architect. Anyway enough of that onward to sunnier pastures!

For those of you who read this blog and enjoy the pretty pictures I am sure the quality of work shown is going to get much better and I hope to be blogging more regularly when I start in January!

But for now I have included my portfolio submission to Gnomon along with a quick video flick through of the sketchbook I sent over. Enjoy!

Update 4: The Goblins are Back!

Yay for goblins! I brought these guys back for an update.  I did a little work on their textures, mostly the knight but here they are in their little camp site! In my head they all have their own little character quirks, I wont go into detail but you can probably gather a little from this scene.  I still have a long way to go in learning about Unreal engine 4 but I think this scene looks really nice and all I did was import the models and textures and place a few lights! Looking forward to getting to know the engine a little better and start producing much nicer work!

Porfolio Update 3: Real Time Renders

I think this is the first ever post I have done showcasing a real time render prop :p  For those of you who don't know real time rendering means no extra time is spent by the computer to calculate the final look of a scene or model.  This is used for games mostly since all the action has to happen instantaneously.  Movies and animation however tend to use rendered images which means computer time has previously been spent calculating light bounces, reflections, refractions etc to make the image look more realistic.

This prop was actually modeled a while ago.  I built her for the first week of my character modeling course at Gnomon.  I was binge watching Attack on Titan at the time and I really liked their outfits! but I didn't have enough time to model a realistic version of one of the characters so I built a Chibi style version of Mikasa.  It was really fun to go back to this model and tweak the modeling a little and bring her all the way through to a textured asset.  It was a little tricky but I managed to get a model through Substance Designer (Material building program) into Unreal 4 (Game Engine).  At some point in the future I hope to take a model even further by adding animations and control but that will be a job for future me! For now I will be getting back into Substance Designer to work on my Enigma Machine.

Portfolio update 2: Bella in Color!

OK second upload.  This one was a little trickier than the desert fortress not in terms of painting or anything that was pretty fun actually but going back to 2015 Maya broke a lot of my characters materials like the skin and hair shaders.  I think I will try and fix these at a later date but for now on to the next one :D

So for those of you familiar with my work the character in both of these shots is Bella from my Character design online course with Gnomon.  Since finishing the 10 weeks of modeling I have textured her and played around a bit more with the hair system which is just so cool I recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind the cost its really fast and can produce some great results.  Don't take these renders as an example somewhere between me actually building the hair in Maya 2016 and rendering it in 2015 a lot of the connections got messed up but check out this link to see what GMH2 is capable of GMH2 hair.
The background was a mini environment project I used to get a little more familiar with texture painting in Mari.  Painting a lot of basic models really let me get to grips with the layered workflow and integration with Maya.
There is a little bit of a story behind the piles of coins though.... A long time back I actually did a little gif of a pirate treasure chest filling with coins coins!!.  Try as I might I just can't get Maya to generate a cascade of primitive objects like you would imagine in a liquid simulation.  I have tried physical emitters but even with letting Maya run for like 45 minutes churning out one coin per second and calculating all the forces (it turns out you can only simulate these with spherical collier meshes hmm...) there doesn't seem to be a way to actually convert the resultant piles of coins into actual geometry.  There are a few scripts out there that promise this but I couldn't get them to work.  So the work around I used for the treasure gif a while ago was to create a lot of coins hovering in space and just drop them and let Maya churn away, much to her distress I am sure, working out all the collisions.  Still for this one there was just toooooo many coins.  Despite the long time it was taking to actually simulate the coins I was determined to find a way without actually placing each individual pile the long way.... Fast forward about 3 determined but ultimately fruitless hours and I finally bit the bullet and just did it the long handed way which only took like 20 minutes opposed to the several hours I had spent trying to do it a smarter way :p oh well live and learn!
For me there is still a tonne more I would like to learn about texture painting and material design I am slowly starting to piece it all together but there is still a ways to go.
It was so fun for me to take Bella through to a textured state, I hope you all enjoy the final look!
Thank you for reading this far :)

Portfolio Update

Its been quite a while since I have posted anything but here is one of the few projects I have been working on for my showcase Portfolio.  Some of you may remember this one from my Environment Modelling course well its all pretty and in color now :) yay!  After battling and I really mean battling in like the most serious way with rendering in Maya 2016 I finally gave up and reverted to 2015 for this piece.  I have also been playing around in Substance Designer which produces some beautiful materials which I will be playing with for my game props later on but for now here is my slightly more basic Maya rendering skills. enjoy!

So this is one of about 13 projects I am currently working on :p I will hopefully be posting a few updates over the next few weeks showing how the other projects are turning out :)  I have a couple more environments, a new character, some cool props, the Willys Jeep and a little work on my adventurer Goblins! so now I have to decide which one to work on next... hmm... oh yea I am also putting together a 120 page sketchbook, while I get back into drawing by hand, almost forgot I should probably go back to that for now.. ok bye :)

WIP Jeep

Ok :) so here are a couple of Work In Progress (WIP) pics for my recent project.  I started this one waaaaaaay back before I started my Gnomon online courses.  It was a little crazy going back to it having spend a few months studying at Gnomon but the difference in skill level really hit me as I was able to very quickly fix all the issues that were slowing me down before and race ahead.  So I will be UV'ing and texturing this piece for my showreel in the future but for now I will be starting my next portfolio project a game prop.

Here I go!

OK so I finished my last online course at Gnomon and now it's time to bite the bullet and start putting together my portfolio!
I got some great advice from Devon during my last class and now that Jen has moved to LA to study at Gnomon I will be working flat out to finish my current projects and build an awesome showreel!! :D
I saw some amazing work displayed in the Autodesk CG Student awards and that has totally inspired me to really pick up my game and work on something amazing!
Wish me luck, here I go!

Environment Modeling Final

We had a double class this week from 3 - 7:30am which was a little tough but we covered some really cool topics from tree modeling to lighting and rendering and then went over some portfolio/website advice! It has been a pretty intense few weeks leading up to the Environment Final.  I had a little trouble nailing down the final composition but I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised with the look of this hand in!  Composition has never been a strong skill for me.  I usually get a rough idea of what I think looks good and just run with it desperate to get the bulk of work to a good level.  For this however we were pushed to question the composition a lot and keep tweaking it till it really looked good.  Its a practice I hope to use for all my work from now on.
There is still plenty to do to this image with regards to adding more intrigue and detail.  I want to redo the palm trees entirely but also just break up some of the more obvious CG'ness that comes from some of the perfect symmetry and crisp lines some of the props have.  The catapults especially were pointed out as being too perfect.  A few extra details and maybe damage would make the whole image more believable.  Then its on to texturing.
So that's it for me and Gnomon for a bit, my next challenge is to finish my last two finals up to a show-reel ready quality and build a few more show-reel pieces and then wish me luck because I will be looking for my first job as a Junior Modeler!!! :D

Gnomon CharacterModeling Final

So its been an amazing 2 months I have learnt so much and I am really happy with the end result!
I spent about 7 weeks just working on the topology of the base mesh, sculpting in the muscular form and adding skin detail etc.  It felt kinda slow compared to my previous Gnomon course but the last 3 weeks we learnt a little about fabric modeling and costume design.  When I got to this stage the development just exploded and started to look real! I did wind up hiding around 90% of my character sculpting work :p but it was still a great learning outcome.  I was getting a little worried 1 week ago before I finished up the jacket and extra props since it was looking a little bare and simple but one more week of work and it all came together!
The last few classes focused on hair and blend shapes (blend shapes are a tool animators use to do facial expressions) As for hair the first image below shows the base strips the hair is projected onto (this is low poly enough to be fed into a game engine and animated) The tpose image (3rd image down) shows how the hair looks when there is a texture applied to it and how it would look in game.  I had never modeled hair this way before but it is a really cool workflow and I really look forward to working on my next project and hopefully taking it all the way into a game engine!
So here it is the final renders for my submission for Character Modeling with Kevin Hudson.  I totally recommend this for anyone who wants to really get a grasp on how characters should be done for animation or games! check out these online Gnomon Courses if you are interested.

This is my posed shot rendered in Keyshot based on the beautiful concept piece below by Changming Xu (http://www.inspirefirst.com/2013/05/31/conceptual-art-changmingxu/)  I made my character a little chunkier than the reference since when I was sculpting the base character she looked more realistic with some muscle mass :p  I also let the jacket sit a little looser rather than quite as form hugging as the reference again it just felt more akin to the character I had in my mind.

This is the unposed (T-pose) mesh that all the development was done on.  This pose is used for modeling because it makes it much easier to rig (build a skeleton to allow animation)  You can also see the rendered hair in this image which was done using ThunderClouds GMH2 plug in which I very much recommend! A great and very easy to use tool.

This image shows some very rough color being applied to the character.  None of the props have been UV'd or textured yet this is more of a visualization shot to get an idea of the overall color and materiality of the character.

This last shot shows the high poly wireframe.  As you can see its pretty dense.  This would actually be ok for an animation for film etc. but if this character was to go into a game the mesh would have to be reduced to about 1/10th of how it looks now.

Character Modeling Update

Just a quick update.  Week 8 and we are finishing up our characters with some costume modeling.  I really like this process, rather than modeling in the wrinkles in with Zbrush the workflow we are using is to create a slightly lower resolution control mesh which has NCloth (Maya tool) dynamics applied to it allowing you to simulate real cloth folds.  What this means is that once you have modeled the fabric geometry you can make your cloth fold realistically.  The character I am working on is wearing tights but I wanted to try out this workflow on the trousers first since its one of the easier pieces of clothing.  The far left image is the trousers with the denim preset (and a little tweaking) the far right image is a simulation of what would happen if your pants suddenly turned to honey... :p Maya is awesome I've always wondered what that would look like!

Gnomon_Update

So its been a while since I last posted and I thought it would be a good time to do a general update on how my Environment and Character modeling courses are going.

So above we have a very cool (imho) looking gun for my pirate character.  I have been finding myself with a little free time after completing my Zbrush sculpting homework for this course so I thought I would get on top of modeling some of the hard surface props she is going to have by the end.  :)  I approached this model in a slightly different way, by building each of the components piece by piece I was able to keep the very refined detail without running excess loops all around the model.  I think if this was going to go into a game engine I would have to retopoligise the mesh but I am planning to do that anyway after I have sculpted in the ornamental detail you can just about see from the concept art behind (not mine from Pintrest)

This is the first stage of my block out for my environment modeling final.  I found a great piece of concept art from Feng Zhu's website check it out there is so much amazing work on display there!  The camera angle was soooo hard, Jen gave me some help but in the end the shot cam has a FOV of like 12 (normal camera is 35) that's very fish eye lens.  I finally got the camera to look right and the rest was pretty easy :) Looking forward to starting the next stage tomorrow

Lastly this is the most recent version of my female sculpt.  Sculpting in the muscle definition was very easy when the underling topology is already there but Jen and I took a trip to the V&A in London just to check out some nice sculpture to help out.  I was previously having a little trouble with the forearm muscles (those things are twisty!!) but after the trip and getting to see some beautiful Greek mythological sculpture I think I got a better grasp of how it all works. Next stage is to sculpt in some skin pore and wrinkle detail and then apply that to the base mesh in Maya with displacement mapping.  Kevin also taught us how to set up a very cool shader that allows for variation in displacement or bump detail.  The example he gave resulted in his human male sculpt being able to animate between smooth skin and bulging veins!! it might sound a little complex if you have never done this before but seeing it in action was so cool!! cant wait to try it out for myself!

Gnomon_EnvironmentModeling Week 04

So my pillar came out pretty well using the Zbrush decimating and uv mapping tools.  It was really fun to try out proxy rendering which worked out well but I was using it for hero props for my last image where I think it would have been better to either use a different technique or more complex proxy shapes that better reflected the silhouette of the model.  It was still a very cool technique to learn though and I will definitely be using it in the future.  I decided to try out the same techniques we learned in class on a more complex model too.  I wasn't able to get Zbrush to retolopogise the high poly mesh without leaving big holes destroying the wings and fingers.  So I used TopoGun to build the low poly mesh instead.  The normal maps worked well and I am getting used to Maya 2016's new hypershade... :p another fun week, looking forward to next class since we will be starting on our finals :D

Gnomon_Environment Modeling Week 2

This week we start our intro to using Zbrush as a prop modeling program.  I found it a little tricky to get Zbrush to do what I wanted since it takes a few tricks to get a hard surface look rather than a traditional sculpted look.  Trying to emulate carved stone was particularly tricky but using some of the techniques we were taught in class did work quite well.  The first column's ivy wrapping round the shaft was done with alphas but the scrolling volutes of the capital was mostly done in Maya.  Figuring out what parts were best to do in Maya vs Zbrush is pretty much what the next few weeks of this course is about.  I got a little frustrated with the first column not coming out the way I wanted so the second Santo de Muerte column was a lot easier to emulate with a traditional sculpting workflow.